Some aspects of the abortion issue

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday February 25, 2002 12:17 by piet

from the left business observer list archive

Here are some 99 posts by the (mystyle) brainiest lady I have so far been able to find webwise.

no brainer: abortion is killing. so what?

Subject: no brainer: abortion is killing. so what?
From: kelley ([email protected])
Date: Mon Aug 23 1999 - 17:56:59 EDT

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Reply: kelley: "no brainer: abortion is killing. so what?"

this is the deal. i think abortion is killing a potential life. i've had
one and i've been a long time activist for abortion rights, arguing for the
absolute unconditional need for abortion. i was almost aborted [drat! huh
carrol?] back when it was illegal and yet i still absolutely support
legalized abortion.

in the spirit of max's initial murmurings and auto-generated, auto-erotic
postings on this topic i would say that, as abortion rights advocates, we
don't do ourselves any favors by running about telling everyone that having
an abortion is like having an appendectomy. not a lot of people agree with
this and yet most people still think abortion ought to remain legal. that
is, i think we ought to respect the fact that people think this way right
now. there's not a whole lot you can do about that and having them read
arguments about the history of abortion doesn't make much of a dent.
people think what they think right now. in this case, the dominant
tendency in the US is for people to think of the issue as a personal,
private moral dilemma and that the state ought not be part of it.
out and in yer face about it among folks other than the folks at pro-choice
rallies is likely to backfire in our faces.

one thing we have on our sides is this: the RTLers are in yer face
assholes that alienate a lot of people by their actions. i think it's
probably wise to keep that sentiment in our favor by not engaging in
similarly stupid actions. i liked michael's suggestions about boycotting
businesses that support RTL, but terribly in your face stuff will make us
look as bad as them. there's a time an place for those activities; this
isn't one of them.

in that sense, i'd be pragmatic about using the "I'm here, I've had an
abortion, get used to it" strategy. I'll use it here on LBO because i
suspect my audience can deal with it and be persuaded, perhaps. I wouldn't
use it at a welfare rights meetings necessarily, particularly since, at
those meetings, there are plenty of women of color who tend not to support
abortion. i don't know about you yoshie, but when i used to do the
petition thing, women of color slammed the door in my face pretty quick.
*none* of them were willing to have their names printed in the local paper
in an ad supporting abortion rights as part of our response to RTLers
staged their friggin' protests every spring. they didn't go to our counter
demonstrations either, though they might privately support and contribute
to abortion rights activities.

how to defend oneself against the right-to-lifers and the "abortion is
murder" argument?

it's a no brainer. abortion is killing but it's not murder. in the first
place, we already make distinctions about killing v. murder do we not?
that is, the legal system recognizes differences in first degree murder,
manslaughter, accidents, crimes of passion, self defense, property defense,
and so forth. when someone is convicted of killing someone else, they are
penalized differently according to the crime and the degree to which the
crime was rational, pre-planned [in cold blood], the result of criminal
negligence, the result of supposed irrationality/passion, etc. if it is
completely an accident or in self-defense then it's not considered
actionable as a form of murder or manslaughter or even involuntary
manslaughter.

given the logic already embedded in the legal system, some forms of killing
aren't actionable [e.g., suicide one was punishable whereas now it's
generally not]. it is really not much of a leap to argue that abortion is
justified and ought not be punishable or considered that big a deal even if
you killed another potential life. if it is okay to kill someone out of
self-defense, then it is surely okay to have an abortion for absolutely any
reason a woman might choose. the person who killed for reasons of
self-defense will likely have all sorts of moral quandaries about that act
or not. that's okay and we allow that, don't we? then it's okay and we
should allow and respect different understandings of what abortion is or
isn't. it's rather unfair to impose one's moral beliefs on others by
telling them that their thinking about abortion, even if they are staunch
pro-choicers, is somehow wrongheaded. the point is that abortion, however
understood, is not a moral act for "the state" to punish by making it
illegal, even though individuals consider it moral.

everything we do or don't do is about moral decision-making. the point is
whether the state ought to be involved. in this case, abortion is killing,
not murder.

as for whether this argument feeds into the RTLers arguments against public
funding for abortions, well the orig point of this thread was about making
concessions for the sake of coalition building. that's a concession i'm
willing to make since it's already the case that there isn't public funding
for abortions. as for the issue max raised--political platforms or deal
making/negotiations regarding public health care provisions among leftist
parties--well it's pretty clear to me that, were such a thing ever to come
about, the abortion docs and the medical community would surely want to get
a piece of that action. it will be in their interest to make abortions
part of a socialized health care delivery system and to keep it legal.

so, it seems to me that prioritizing might not be such a bad thing.

first, fight for unconditional access to abortion whenever possible
second, fight like hell against attempts to undermine abortion access.
third, concede on the public funding issue in order to get socialized
health care delivery in the first place __IF that's what is necessary.
fourth, when that magic day comes [and even before] start working with the
medical community to get them on board with the idea that abortion should
be part of publicly subsidized health care. that's a no-brainer and it
will be easy, for the most part, to get such a powerful community on board
with that one.
fifth, abortion rights activists, right now, ought to work toward getting
the ratfucker HMOs to push for maintaining and expanding abortion services
and access too, since their damn logic is all about preventative health
care.

ps., the whole woman rights vs. child's rights is a big fat duh. the issue
isn't about that, it's about a woman's right vs. the *STATE's* interest in
protecting a potential life. the state has no interest in protecting an
unborn child's life. the viability issue is a canard that would be pretty
much meaningless under a different set of social conditions.

pps., bullshit blahbedeblah about moralism is it's own godamed moralism in
which you simply impose your own "you should think this way and act that
way" on others in order to condemn their arguments by exposing them as not
good enough marxists. iow, there's a question about how to do or think
about something and, as such, it's a moral fucking issue. get over it
already. that's why aristotle and plato called it "the ethical-political".
so, yes it's really about struggle, but denying that it's about the
ethical doesn't get you very far because when you say struggle and
political you also say ethical./moral.

kelley

-----------------------------------------

marta wrote

>I don't like having the RTLs on this side of the issue, believe me, it is not
>my cup of tea. One problem we have is distinguishing the disability
>perspective from the RTL (who by the way are always eager to portray us as
>RTL). I agree with you that abortion is a serious matter not like having an
>organ removed.

yeah, agreed that i wouldn't be happy about that either! but pramatically,
it is true that this would make an argument like singer's dead in the
water, even were we to have different views about infantacide.
>
>I support abortion but take the Adrienne Asche's position that it crosses the
>line when one aborts because one does not like the characteristic of the
fetus
>(sex, disability, hair color, whatever else they will know about us in the
>womb) rather than having the abortion because the conditions in one's life
>makes that choice necessary to abort ANY fetus. This way I challenge
>assumptions about disablement as one would challenge the assumption that
having
>a boy is more desirable than having a girl. I realize many many people view
>disability as a primary reason to abort. Trouble is the more market oriented
>our society becomes, the less willing parents are to have a non "perfect"
baby.

i do understand where you are coming from. as i stated at the outset of my
entry into this, my mother almost had an abortion with me. so i've had to
think carefully about this. the thought doesn't loom large in my mind--at
least not the way the rtlers would like to believe it does! but
nonetheless. now, she felt she couldn't have me because of public judgment
not really because of economic circumstances. she was working three jobs,
living at home and could continue to live at home, had no thought of going
to college, though she completed her training as a beautician at the local
beauty school and so had a skill that would support both of us at the time.
the biggest trouble was illegitimacy and fear of judgment. she was so
fearful that she never told anyone, save for one friend, and hid it til
labor day and i was born 20 day later. amazing , huh?

my point for teling this story is that attitudes toward what is and isn't
desirable change. and another point is that there may be reasons for
having an abortion that have nothing to do with economic constraints. a
woman should be able to have one even if she's a wealthy 25 yr. old.

which leads me to my concern about asche's argument is that, while i think
it's wrong to abort simply because one is unhappy with the looks of a
child, such views question the motives of an individual and judge them
rather than viewing it as a social problem that is produced systematically
by the capitalist, sexist, racist social relations in this society. in
other words, the *cause* of those feelings and attitudes lies elsewhere.
individuals are reponsible for producing them, yes. but changing those
attitudes, i don't think, will come about by constraining access to
abortion in the months after it might be possible to find out eye color,
hair color and i think what you want to say is, whether or not the child
has a disability. that's really the most important issue for us, right?
as i recall, you worry that devaluing the disabled by allowing abortions
because parents don't want to raised disabled children is a problem because
it contributes to and strengthens the kinds of attitudes we'd like to
eradicate. but, i just can't see why constraining access to abortion will
necessarily promote the oppression of the disabled. it seems to me that
this oppression is rooted in many other places and is primarily and
fundamentally located w/in capitalism though not entirely so insofar as it
is a form of cultural imperialism.

so i would say that perhaps it isn't so much a tradeoff b/t women's rights
and the rts of the disabled. if you say that aborting because of eye
color is a problem b/c it's frivilous does that open the door to say that a
healthy, married, employed women with a husband who does half the
housework, and with plenty of money to hire help, who owns her own business
and won't suffer from the mommy track is therefore frivilous for not
wanting to have a child? people have thought that my abortions were
frivilous because we could have raised children. it would have been hard
but i would have finished my phd, gotten a job and things would have a-ok.
and, they're right. i just didn't, ultimately, want to raise a child at
that point in my life, even though my partner was really pretty good about
housework and the like. also, what about, and there are plenty of people
i know who say this, they don't want children because they don't like
children that much? does aborting b/c you don't like children encourage
anti-child sentiments which some think are pretty darn real in this country
given what we allow to happen to a lot of them?

i guess i'd want to take a two pronged approach to the concerns you've
raised here before. 1. changing the perception of bodily, physical
perfection through education, media criticism and the like. 2. changing
the conditions which make it diff for those who may not be so much
concerned with 1 as they are concered about the difficulty in raising a
disabled child. i'm sure i don't have to lay them out for you, but i will
for others reading: better services, better education, new forms of
parenting that don't lay the entire burden on the parents, obviously
adequate incomes, sexism that means that women bear the burden of the mommy
track and bear the burden of primary care more often than not.

kelley

>Disability activists have only recently inserted ourselves into the issue
>whereas before the "professionals" always spoke ABOUT US WITHOUT US.
There is
>still lots of confusion about how best to get our message out there without
>seeming RTL. And as within any identity group, (as with women) there will be
>some people with disabilities who do not favor abortion under any
>circumstances, but I am not one of those and neither are most advocates I
know.
>
>Marta
>